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Bloody Worms, Competitive Stuffing of One’s Pie Hole

:: A couple of days ago, I started receiving random e-mails, 82 of them since Aug 31st, each infected with the W32.Sobig.F@mm worm. What a pain in the ass. I’ve run the removal tool, which confirms that the worm isn’t on my machine, but the feckin’ e-mails keep coming. Every one gets caught by Norton Antivirus and automatically deleted, but I don’t know how to prevent them from coming in. The Symantec page includes a list of IP addresses correlating to the master servers, so I added those to my firewall restricted zone.

*sigh* One wishes those who waste their lives creating destructive worms and viruses might do something productive, like discover girls, or breath through their noses instead of their mouths. Or at least consider getting a life.

:: Tomorrow I’m on campus to deliver a couple of short presentations during Orientation’03, and then teach to 110 Chemical Engineering 200 students. Classes don’t actually begin until Wednesday. The hordes are back, long live the hordes.

:: I’ve heard of this before, but this article in the NYTimes Magazine (ID and PW: podbay) about competitive eating, well, turns my stomach. It details how one competitor “trains” for these events:

    It is 11:30 p.m., the end of a long night of gastronomic training for Hughes. For the past four hours, he and his wife, Tereasa, have been buffet-hopping with me in and around their hometown of Newport News, Va. First came Captain George’s Seafood, where the 44-year-old Hughes systematically attacked the 80-foot spread, downing 10 soft-shell crabs, 120 or so shrimp, a small steak, a handful of crawfish, a plate of crab legs and one (purely symbolic) asparagus stalk. At one point, he peeled and ate 60 shrimp while Tereasa timed him with her electronic wristwatch. Tossing them into his churning maw as if they were M&M’s, shellfish shrapnel spraying the table, he finished in 4 minutes 32 seconds, an effort he pronounced ”respectable.”

    After abortive trips to the Golden City buffet and the Golden Palace buffet, each of which Hughes deemed too low on food, we headed to the Szechuan Inn, where Hughes inhaled 10 pieces of sushi, another 20 shrimp and some chicken. Finally, we drove to the County Grill and Smokehouse. Before entering, Hughes, a stubby, cherubic man imbued with childlike enthusiasm, lifted his shirt to show off his distended stomach, which had swollen to just under the size of a beach ball and made an elastic pinging noise when he thwapped it with his finger. Inside the restaurant, he ate two orders of collard greens, a pile about the size of two fists, in 18 seconds. To an untrained eye, the evening was an astounding digestive display. But to Hughes, who eats heavily at buffets like these two or three times a week, it was a grave disappointment. ”You see, this is my problem,” he said, small pebbles of sweat clinging to his forehead as he surveyed the obstinate wieners, which had been ordered post-collard greens. ”I’m good on speed, but I just can’t do the volume yet. If I’m going to be a champion, I need to be able to go big on volume.”

Such is the state of the world. Gee, imagine that those who compete must also actually consider long-term health. The 25-year old hot dog-eating champ, Takeru Kobayashi, set the world record in 2002, eating 50.5 hot dogs in 12 minutes. In those 12 minutes, he consumed 15,600 calories and >1,000 grams of fat, and gained 8 pounds. Heart attack on a plate.

The scariest thing is that all of this is actually so important to enough people that there exists an association, The International Federation of Competetive Eating. Read their mandate. They consider this activity a “sport”. I wonder if they ever hold competitions in third world countries in which most citizens are starving. Please forgive me if I find this activity morally repugnant.

10 Responses to “Bloody Worms, Competitive Stuffing of One’s Pie Hole”

  1. Keith Says:

    Blocking the IP addresses of the known Sobig servers won’t stop the worms. The worms you are receiving are actually coming from the IP addresses of your friends and associates (anyone who has your e-mail address in their address book or certain other types of files). A long-winded explanation of tracking the source of a similar Klez virus can be found on this web page:

    http://clubweb.interbaun.com/fenske/bloggo7.htm#virus

  2. Keith Says:

    I should also point out that e-mail viruses like Klez and Sobig connect to your e-mail server, not to your computer, so your firewall is of no help in stopping the worms … unless you want to block all network traffic to your e-mail server (joke).

  3. randy Says:

    This makes me sad. I read as much of your tracking explanation as I could before my brain imploded, thanks for the info. So, do I just wait for days/weeks/months in hopes that the SobigF e-mails I’m receiving just stop one day?

  4. Keith Says:

    The good news is that W32.Sobig.F@mm de-activates itself on September 10th, so you won’t receive any more after that (except for people with the wrong date and time on their system’s clock). All of the Sobig viruses have had the same approx. 4-week time limit. It’s obviously a strategy by the virus writer to see how far the virus will propagate in a fixed amount of time.

    The bad news is that there will be more Sobig viruses, and many more viruses of other kinds. Most of the new ones have their own SMTP engines, which means that the “from” and “reply to” addresses are spoofed (taken from the victim’s address book). Only the originating IP address is valid. If you have too much time on your hands, you can follow the advice on my web page to trace the IP address and contact the ISP of whoever has the virus. Given the complete message headers, the ISP can match the IP address with their connection records. Ask the ISP politely to assist their customer in installing and running up-to-date virus software. They usually do.

  5. Steve 40 Says:

    I was e-mailed a message that I should have known better than to open it. It is the Spybot.gen worm (I think the name Malware came up as well). The message said my e-mail address was being changed the return address was admin@telus.net and for more information look at the attachment. My virus checker told me the virus was there, but let it on. I hope I have it off now, it seems to be gone, and the Virus checker said it is healed, and I went to one other checker site and it also said I am healed. I have gotten that e-mail daily for the last while, but the filter deletes it now. Why are there so many idiots out there?

  6. Keith Says:

    Hi, Steve. Long time, no see. You ask why there are so many idiots out there. Well, take the disgruntled hacker everyone seems to know in their own neighborhood. Multiply that by the number of neighborhoods in the world. Immediate access to such a vast pool of nastiness is a feature of the Internet!

    PS: I forgot to tell my Sobig/wedding night joke, but Randy didn’t like it over the phone anyway.

  7. Tereasa Hughes Says:

    This is the wife of that competitive eater……..what a wonderful time we’ve had this summer participating in the events around the states. Carson started competitive eating in June and his last formal event was in August….in that short period of time people flew us around the states from Coney Island New York to LA California to eat and speak. About 9,000 dollars worth of traveling (hotels, air flights, meals, etc…). Guess spending one summer as a competitive eater can be profitable, exciting and challanging……..what a way to experience life to the fullest. Hope you guys didn’t spend your summer sitting behind that computer.

  8. Tereasa Hughes Says:

    Oops the URL didn’t show up…here it is for those interested in visiting my husbands web page:

    http://www.members.cox.net/carson

  9. randy Says:

    Tereasa, I appreciate that it is an exciting lifestyle for you and your husband. Whatever makes one happy, I suppose.

    As I mentioned, I find the idea of competitive eating to be repugnant, given that 3/4 of the world is starving.

    I didn’t spend my entire summer behind a computer. I worked, had a couple of vacations, saw a lot of music, and enjoyed life as best I could.

  10. randy Says:

    Tereasa, I appreciate that it is an exciting lifestyle for you and your husband. Whatever makes one happy, I suppose.

    As I mentioned, I find the idea of competitive eating to be repugnant, given that 3/4 of the world is starving.

    I didn’t spend my entire summer behind a computer. I worked, had a couple of vacations, saw a lot of music, and enjoyed life as best I could.

    BTW, thanks for taking the time to send a comment.

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